by Mark Tufo
“Why now and why send two henchmen?”
“Don’t know about the ‘why now’ part; maybe he caught wind of you leaving and wanted to get his chance while he could.
“Great, kill me before I die. Wonderful.”
“You know what I mean,” Paul said. “And maybe he sent a couple of goons because you would have recognized him.”
“You think crazy runs in the family?” I asked.
“He did send two men to kidnap you,” Dee said.
“Maybe he just wanted to thank me for ending that bat-shit crazy brother’s life,” I said.
“Doubtful,” Dee said.
“You’re probably right,” I answered.
The doctor pushed past me to get to the bleeding man. I had completely forgotten about him. The doctor looked scornfully at Paul.
“Accidental discharge, Doc. Fix him up as best you can. Don’t spend too much time on him. Cut the leg off if you have to.”
Man one passed out.
“If this man survives and is out of immediate danger I want him in the brig,” Paul told the returning guard.
The doctor had a medical team and a gurney and was extracting his patient when the radio on Paul’s desk came to life.
“Sir, we have a situation down here in general housing.”
Paul grabbed the walkie off his desk. “Elaborate.”
“Sir, the man you sent us to pick up says he has a bomb. He says it’s big enough to take out a fair portion of the Hill and make a big enough tremor that the aliens would notice.”
“Can anyone put a bullet in his brain?” Paul asked.
“Sir, we do not have a visual on him.”
“Shit. I’ll be right down there.”
“Sir, one more thing. He says he will come out peacefully if Michael Talbot comes here personally.”
“Of course he did,” I said in the background.
“Tell him to go fuck—” Paul started.
I put my hand up. “Don’t do that, Paul. If he’s got the bomb he’ll use it.”
“Belay that, Sergeant,” Paul said in the radio. “We’ll be right down. Can you evacuate the area?”
“No, sir, he said if heard anything like that he would detonate,” the sergeant said.
“Sergeant, what’s your gut say? Does he have an IED?” Paul asked.
“I know the man, sir. He’s in munitions, my educated guess would say ‘yes’.”
“We’re on our way. Out.” Paul opened the cylinder of his revolver and replaced the spent cartridge with a new one.
“What about him?” I asked Paul, pointing to the passed out man.
Paul pulled back the hammer on his pistol and put it up against the man’s eye. The man did not stir.
I could tell Paul was contemplating putting a bullet in him, I had never seen Paul so cold in my life. I thought I had spread my humanity thin, Paul’s was hardly present.
“He’s out, I’ll deal with him later,” Paul said.
I relaxed. There’s not much I won’t do for the preservation of the lives of those I loved, including myself, but killing a passed out handcuffed man was not on that list, I hoped.
“Corporal,” Paul said as we headed into the anteroom, speaking to his attaché.
“Yes, sir.”
“Make sure that piece of shit is out of my office and in the brig when I get back.”
“Yes, sir.”
***
The hallway was cramped with armed personnel, guns all trained on absolutely nothing. It was quiet but it was tense all the same. The thought of death by explosion was weighing heavily on every man and woman present.
“What’s his name?” Paul asked the Sergeant as we came up.
“Dunner, sir,” the sergeant answered, never taking his eyes off the closed door. I guess he figured if he kept a visual, the unthinkable wouldn’t be able to happen.
“Really, Dunner and Durgan?” I said aloud. “Their parents couldn’t get anymore original than that?”
The sergeant looked back at me, he seemed a little perturbed.
“Dunner, this is General Ginson. I’d like to have a word with you,” Paul stated loudly.
“Hello, General, nice of you to join my party. But I only invited one person and if he doesn’t show I will be so distraught I’ll just have to destroy everything.”
“Sure sounds like his brother,” I said softly to Dee.
Dee nodded in reply.
“Michael Talbot is here,” Paul said. “Why don’t you come out and say what you have to say?”
“The little fuckwad is here? I didn’t think he’d have the balls!”
“I get that a lot.”
“Not now, Mike,” Paul said to me tensely.
“Sorry, I’m a little nervous right now.”
“We all are,” he said.
“I am not,” Dee added for good measure.
“Send him up here!” Dunner yelled.
“I don’t think that’s how this is going to happen,” Paul answered.
“I’m making the rules around here now, General!” Dunner screamed.
“Blow the place up, then because if you’re in charge it’s already over,” Paul answered calmly.
I wanted to ask Paul why he was egging the crazy man on.
“I’ll do it!!!” Dunner screamed.
I truly believed he would too, I think he was building up enough crazy juice.
“Your brother was an asshole!” I yelled.
“Talbot?” Dunner asked.
“Dickwad present and accounted for,” I answered back.
“I didn’t think you’d show. I couldn’t imagine you’d risk your precious hide now that you walk on water,” Dunner said.
“When did you learn how to do that?” Dee asked in earnest.
“What do you want, Dunner?” I asked.
“I want you to pay for what you did to my brother.”
“He was a psychotic madman who needed to be put down like a rabid dog!” I yelled.
Paul looked at me like he wanted to know why I was egging the crazy man on now.
“I miss him,” Dunner said. “And now we can all join him.”
“Whoa—wait!” I yelled stepping forward. Dunner was planning on detonating the bomb when I was in range. “What kind of satisfaction is that gonna be for you?”
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“I mean, if I walk on water, it’s safe to assume where I’ll be going and we all know that suicide is a mortal sin so we know where you’ll be headed. How are you two planning on kicking my eternal ass if you’re nowhere around?” I asked.
“Huh?” he asked. “I didn’t mean you walk on water like Jesus Christ, asshole!”
“Are you a believer Dunner?” I asked.
“Baptist, through and through!” he yelled proudly.
“Of course you are,” I said calmly. “Even dumbass Baptists like yourself know if you kill yourself, you get a one-way pass to damnation.”
Dunner paused, I think we could all hear the cogs in his brain meshing together, trying to reason out what he should do now. “I would really like to kill you,” he finally said.
“Get in line,” I told him.
I moved a step closer to his room, if he blasted the damn thing, I wanted to be as close as possible, I could hear movement in the room and then I heard his door handle turn. Thirty rifles came to bear.
“I’m coming out, but before any of you pansies gets the wrong idea, I have the bomb on a fifteen minute timer and I can guarantee nobody in this base is qualified to disarm it in that amount of time. I am going to have a little one-on-one time with my new friend. If he bests me, I will give him the code. If he doesn’t, then all of your deaths will be on his head and my God will absolve me of any wrongdoing.”
“I don’t think that’s really how it works,” I said.
His door swung inwards, my face flushed, and I involuntarily took a couple of steps backward, Durgan stepped through the door.
&n
bsp; “You’re dead,” I said, softly pointing at him.
“We’re twins—who’s the dumbass now?”
I wanted to tell him that it was still him, but I was having great difficulty forming words with my mouth hanging open. As my mind raced to catch up, I began to notice subtle differences between the two; Dunner was maybe twenty to twenty-five pounds lighter and although he was crazy, the torch of insanity didn’t burn quite as bright within him.
“Mike, I can kill him, we’ll take our chances with the bomb,” Paul said.
That sounded like an incredibly awesome plan at the moment.
Dunner ignored it completely. “I was supposed to go to that concert with him. Ended up in jail for a domestic dispute.”
“Imagine that,” I said, still backing up warily.
“We would have been unbeatable in those games together.”
Games? Funny, I never thought of them as games. I didn’t have the heart or enough moisture in my mouth to tell him the aliens probably would have squared them off against each other for the mere sport of it. And something tells me they both would have tried to do the other in.
“I’ve watched you since you’ve come back and I still can’t figure out how a spindly little fuck like yourself took my brother down. Best I can figure is that you drugged him.”
“Yeah, we were in the sauna together and I slipped him a mickey,” I said as my back came in contact with the wall behind me. My survival instinct kept me from turning and looking. Whiplash fast, Dunner struck.
I deflected his right-hand roundhouse with my left arm, but still the force of it sent me to the ground.
“You ain’t shit!” he screamed. “My brother was five times the man you are, there’s no reason he shouldn’t have killed you!” Rage-fueled spittle flew everywhere. “And I’m twice the man he was so this oughtta be pretty easy!” he said as he advanced on me.
“Mike?” Paul shouted.
“Not yet, Paul,” I said standing back up. “Get some people in there though and see if there is a bomb because if there isn’t I would rather you just shot him.”
Dunner smiled. “Bet you’d like that, because you’re chicken shit. That’s the only way you could have beat him.”
Dunner rushed me again, I slammed a fist into his cheek it was pretty much like hitting a rhino with a fly swatter. He grabbed me around the waist and had me suspended in the air. I knew this was going to hurt badly as he drove me to the floor. The thin commercial carpeting did little to shield me from the brunt of the concrete underneath. All of the breath had been knocked out of me and I was paralyzed for a moment with pain.
Dunner stood up to admire his handiwork. “Shit, my woman used to put up more of a fight than you, you fucking pussy.”
I noticed he had a rug burn on his knuckles from our encounter so far, at least I had caused some damage.
I was wincing with pain, but still able to get the understanding that yes indeed there was a bomb attached to a timer in Dunner’s room as Paul nodded sternly in my direction a scowl lining his features.
I slowly stood, taking in small breaths, each one sending electrifying shocks of pain down my spine.
“Didn’t think you’d get back up,” Dunner said, looking over to me.
“Glutton… for… punishment,” I whispered.
He started coming toward me again.
“Wait, one second,” I begged. “Just in the off-chance I win, how will I get the code?”
“Not that I think there’s a chance but…” Dunner walked over to me quickly, I’m ashamed to say I flinched badly. He laughed as he got close to my head and whispered, “Five-two-zero,” in my right ear. “Now before you go getting all smart and thinking you can run away and tell them the code, that’s only the first three numbers out of four and you only get two chances to get it right before the failsafe kicks in.”
One-in-five still sounded like better odds than me beating this guy in a fight.
“You ready?” he asked, stepping back a pace.
“No,” I told him honestly.
He smirked before he bull rushed me again. I was more prepared this time as I moved slightly to my left, his head missed my gut but his right arm wrapped around me as I brought my left knee up into his nose. He immediately let go and went a few steps past. He whipped his head up, blood flowing freely from his damaged sniffer. His eyes were watering like lawn sprinklers.
“Fucker!” he shouted.
I wasn’t Dunner, I saw no need to talk when an opportunity presented itself. I turned to deliver a hard punch to his now tender spot. He saw it coming and turned just enough that it hit his cheek. Something snapped, either my hand or his cheekbone. My hand was throbbing, but he was howling in pain and rage.
I was about to move in for a more decisive blow, but he lashed out with a roundhouse kick that would have taken my head off if I hadn’t ducked. He still caught the top of my dome, sending me off target.
I wouldn’t have thought he had the room for that maneuver. I would’ve thought wrong. And more importantly for the last time.
“Like that?” he asked as blood ran across his snarling teeth. “My brother never saw the benefit in it but I’m a black belt in karate.”
“My lucky day,” I told him, looking for an opening.
He got into a classic Bruce Lee pose, he even did the finger ‘come hither’ move. I’d seen the movie, I didn’t ‘come hither’. I’d seen what had happened to Chuck Norris.
He did the gesture again, I did my own and gave him the finger. He charged me again, he might have known martial arts, but anger was clouding his judgment. I moved faster this time, getting my foot out as fast as I could, he nearly tripped over my extended appendage, his head mere inches from crashing into the cement wall in the hallway. He put his hands up just in time to keep from crushing his skull. I turned and kicked the back of his knee collapsing his leg so he was halfway down. My next kick hit his exposed rib cage. I laid every ounce of my body weight into that and was rewarded with a sound more akin to dry branches snapping on a cold winter day.
Before I could revel in my win, Dunner righted his ship and was once again standing and facing me. A glimmer of a grimace crossed his face but otherwise he looked fairly intact.
“I didn’t think you had it in you,” he said much more warily and with much less swagger in his voice. “My brother was an asshole.” He coughed, the grimace came back with a vengeance. “But he was my brother.” Dunner had been playing possum, he launched at me, his fist caught the side of my neck as I twisted away. I felt like someone had taken a baseball bat to me. If he had hit my Adam’s apple, I was pretty sure he would have killed me.
I punched him hard in his already damaged side, my fist sunk much deeper than it should have. Dunner dropped to his knees.
“It’s over,” I said, making sure I was out of range of his arms.
“For all of us.”
“You promised the rest of the code if I beat you,” I told him.
“I never promised and I’m as big an asshole as my brother. You’ve got no chance of getting that last digit from me.”
“How much time on the counter?” I asked out loud to the sergeant who had gone into Dunner’s room to verify its existence.
“Four minutes, thirty seconds,” was his reply.
“Evac everyone as far from here as possible,” I said
Paul issued a couple of commands and residents began to scurry for their lives. Paul came up to me. “He won’t give the code?”
I shook my head. Paul didn’t hesitate as he put a bullet through the man’s forehead.
“Holy shit, Paul!” I said.
“I didn’t think you had it in you,” Paul said to me. “The fight, I mean, I really thought he was going to tear you apart.”
“I’ve had a lot of practice,” I told him, still staring at the body that had been Dunner. A spreading pool of blood was blossoming around his head. “And I could say the same about you.”
“This man had threate
ned our very existence. I feel nothing for him. I feel worse for the personnel that will have to clean this mess up.”
“Sir, there’s a keypad for entering a stop code, should I try it?” the sergeant asked. “We’re down to three minutes.”
“Whoa, hold on,” I told him, “He gave me the first three digits.”
“You sure about that?” Paul asked. “Because if this place goes up I would rather you weren’t anywhere near here. No matter what happens here you could still stop the invasion.”
“Let me try, Paul.”
“Mike, you have to look at the bigger picture.”
“Paul, I’ve got three out of four digits, just let me try. We get two tries.”
“And then?”
“We run like hell,” I told him.
I quickly went into the room. The bomb was ticking down just like you’ve seen on a hundred different shows and movies, but it’s much more intimidating when it’s your body parts about to be dispersed.
“Alright, so he told me five-two-six. I’m thinking he won’t have any repeating numbers, that leaves zero-one-three-four-seven-eight-nine, that’s a two in seven shot of not blowing up.”
“Are you talking to me?” Paul asked.
“Just trying to reason this out.”
“We’re down to two minutes, maybe you should reason quicker.”
“That oughtta help,” I told him.
“Just punch in a number,” Paul said.
“It is true, Michael. Inaction is as bad as a bad action in this scenario,” Dee said.
“Dee, don’t you maybe want to find safer ground?” I asked him with my hand hovering over the pad.
“I am confident you will figure this out,” Dee said, picking up some of Dunner’s possessions and looking at them as if he were at an estate sale.
I punched in five-two-six-zero. We were immediately rewarded with an ear piercing buzzing sound and thirty seconds wound off the clock. “Well, at least now it’s a one in six shot,” I said as sweat poured off my body. Maybe I could short it out with the salt water coming off of me. I had a good minute and fifteen seconds for that to happen.
“Mike, leave,” Paul said.
“I didn’t leave you in that car and I’m not leaving now,” I said as I punched in five, two, six and my finger was hovering over the nine. I had made contact with the plastic when Dee turned calmly toward me and told me to stop. If a fly had landed on my finger it would have tipped the scale and the button would have been plunged.